MedlinePlus – Wellness and Lifestyle

MedlinePlus - Wellness and Lifestyle primarily provides access to a few other MedLine Plus sections and pages related to wellness & lifestyle. There are links to alternative health care options, routine medical & dental care and screening, healthy living, and traveler's health. This section may help initiate research into health & wellness, but other more specific sections would be more useful

Scoring

Ease of Use

This section of MedlinePlus is just an alphabetical list of wellness & lifestyle topics. Clicking any one of the 27 listed here leads to a page with a brief summary as well as numerous links to additional information. It requires users to constantly jump back and forth between websites, but otherwise all the relevant material is contained to this one page of resources.

Visual Design

The landing page only provides a list of topics about wellness & lifestyle suggestions. No images or multimedia to engage the reader. And the material is not organized aside from alphabetically, whereas topic headings would benefit the visual appearance. MedlinePlus already features a dull graphic design; this page brings the quality down to the most basic level.

Quality

Users will discover that this section is of limited utility as a result of the paucity of wellness & lifestyle topics. The materials assembled here come from a wide variety of sources, most of them from high quality perspectives. Not all pages are fleshed out with the same depth.

Credibility

MedlinePlus clearly identifies the organizations responsible for the content, which include the American Heart Association, Mayo Foundation for Medical Education & Research, Occupational Safety & Health Administration, Nemours Foundation, American Academy of Family Physicians, and Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Users will find that the medical encyclopedia topics have the highest reliability, as they list the names of medical reviewers and date of last review. However, the currency of web pages linked on MedlinePlus vary, and individual authors and editors are only occasionally credited on the linked sites.

Pros

Links to extensive an Medical Encyclopedia as well as some pages and sections related to wellness & lifestyle

Highly credible website with backing from the U.S. government and relying on materials generated by authoritative organizations

Information is appropriate for consumers, reliable and up-to-date

Cons

There are only a limited number of wellness & lifestyle topics available to peruse